A Personal Tale

Way, way back when I was an 18-year-old in the great state of Florida, I had a realization that would inform many of my future life decisions: if you play enough hands of poker, it’s all math. This is a realization many stat heads have had. Then they go into careers in statistical fields, to make the whole thing look cool. Multiple times, a friend and I played poker tournaments deep into the night after having been at HIGH SCHOOL earlier in the day. Yes, the casinos there let you play poker at 18, because it’s Florida.

Florida is a wonderland of gambling. You’ve got horses that race each other! You’ve got dogs that race each other! You can bet on men flinging a ball at each other with a giant Frito-looking contraption without really even knowing what the rules are! Alligator wrestling? Probably a thing you can bet on. If someone out there decided to take action on my first-grade field day (in which I won the sack race, entirely because there was a hole in the bottom of the sack), someone out there would have taken them up on it! Florida! There’s a lot of things Florida does badly: educating people, fostering an environment of job creation, voter participation, electing competent and intelligent public leaders, the list goes on, but there’s one thing they do great: GAMBLING.

When I moved to Washington DC for college, I was faced with a great problem: I couldn’t GAMBLE on anything! Nothing at all, much less sports betting. If only I had a convenient way to leverage all of this technology we have at our fingertips nowadays to put monetary stakes on my painstakingly crafted sports predictions! If only I had something like William Hill. That would have been great. I wish I had known about that instead of spending several years lost in a proverbial sea, without a vehicle by which to honor my Florida roots. Now I can have that extra bit of investment coloring every minute of my otherwise unexciting baseball viewing! Or basketball viewing! Or Hockey viewing!